Large business enterprises typically use a variety of independent computer-based software applications to capture and store business data. Data warehousing applications are often used to consolidate information from such applications, where specifications known as Business Intelligence (BI) report definitions are used to generate a variety of BI reports from such data for review by management or other parties. While different enterprise units may draw from the same enterprise data when creating BI report definitions, they are often free to use different labels for the same data in the resulting reports, as different enterprise units may employ different terminology. For example, a sales department might refer to “Total Sales” whereas an accounting department might refer to the same data as “Total Revenue.”
Large business enterprises are also often required by government regulation to implement certain data management practices, such as to improve the quality of the data they are required to provide to various government agencies or other parties. To support this, large business enterprises will typically develop a glossary of business terms, including a precise definition of each term. This glossary is then used by all parties in the enterprise to ensure there is a common understanding of these business terms when providing data as part of regulation compliance. For example, if different enterprise units are to contribute data to support a report on the enterprise's “forecast net present value,” an enterprise-wide glossary of business terms may be used by all data contributors to ensure that they all have the same understanding of this term, and therefore provide the correct data.